“Spider-Verse” Clips & Visual Look Explained – Dark Horizons

There’s a lot about the upcoming animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” film that critics who’ve seen it are acclaiming, and one of them is the animation style which is truly unlike anything put to screen before.

Slashfilm spoke with directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman about the visual technique and how it came together. Persichetti says the simplest explanation is that it’s a blend of CG animation and 2D hand-drawn animation along with elements of comic book art and street art:

“We had these characters modelled based off of drawings, and then once we did that, we realized some of the really expressive parts of the designs were actually the line work. We went in and figured out a way to draw line work on top of these characters three-dimensionally, and then that line work could accept light if it needed to, or not.

There’s 24 frames a second in film, and in all CGI right now, there’s a new image for every frame of movement. In traditional hand-drawn animation, you only needed twelve drawings to fill it up because your eye can’t catch that little – you can hold a drawing for two frames, but if you hold a drawing for three, your eye can kind of catch the fact that it’s being held. So we stripped out everything, we animated this on twos, and they had to write a bunch of new algorithms and things to try to make up for the lost simulations of all that stuff, like hair and cloth. But it really just makes it feel crunchy and crispy.

Then the final little reason why it’s so crisp is that there’s not one frame of motion blur anywhere in the movie. That’s in every movie now. Even live-action with CG VFX, they put motion blur on it because it just helps soften it, and we were just looking for something that felt a little more punchy.”

The result of all this is that the shots took four times longer than a regular animated film to do, while the shot count is two to three times higher than most animated movies. A bunch of new clips from the film are out as well, check them out below: